Ted Nordhaus

Co-founder and Executive Director

Ted Nordhaus is a leading global thinker on energy, environment, climate, human development, and politics. He is the co-founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute and a co-author of "An Ecomodernist Manifesto."

His 2007 book Break Through, co-authored with Michael Shellenberger, was called "prescient" by Time and "the best thing to happen to environmentalism since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring" by Wired. (An excerpt in The New Republic can be read here.) Their 2004 essay, "The Death of Environmentalism," was featured on the front page of the Sunday New York Times, sparked a national debate, and inspired a generation of young environmentalists.

Nordhaus is executive editor of the Breakthrough Journal, which The New Republic called "among the most complete efforts to provide a fresh answer" to the question of how to modernize liberal thought, and the National Review called "The most promising effort at self-criticism by our liberal cousins in a long time."

Efforts to reach a sweeping, 10 year budget deal collapsed recently after Tea Party Republicans forced Party leadership to oppose any compromise that included tax cuts -- even after President Obama had put treasured Democratic entitlements like Social Security on the chopping block.